You can’t plan for unintended consequences, but you want as many good ones to emerge

What if your unintended consequences were as big as the intended ones? This happens in our Viral Change™ programmes all the time and could happen in any other of your organizational initiatives. I am not sure we always capture them.

If nobody sees them is perhaps because they were not in the KPI list.

Intended consequences of a particular Viral Change™ programme: to create a culture of X , by scaling up a particular set of behaviours. Large scale behavioural and cultural change with objectives X,Y,X

Unintended consequences, end of year 1 (never explicit in day 1 or declared objectives), all real, none theoretical:

Pride
Sense of belonging
Spontaneous collaboration
Can I help you? Multiplied like hell
Sense of ‘agency’ (I can do that)
Readiness to change, again and again
Employee engagement, the real one, not the crap one
Legacy: this is what I leave behind
This is what I will tell my children
Now I believe in this company
I don’t need permission anymore
Peer to peer power
Collective leadership
No tolerance for negativity anymore. It’s not a managerial issue, it’s a peer issue
It’s for us, not just the company
Fulfillment
The best I’ve done